Baseball's Hall of Fame was built on a myth to rescue a village
Cooperstown became baseball's shrine because of a story that is not true: that Abner Doubleday invented the game there in the 1830s. A sewing-machine heir used that legend to lure tourists back to a village battered by the Depression and by Prohibition, which had wrecked its hop farms.
Stephen Carlton Clark, heir to the Singer fortune, founded the Hall in 1939 and paid for its building, dedicated on June 12 of that year; his granddaughter Jane Forbes Clark now chairs the board. The first class had been picked three years earlier: Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson and Honus Wagner, joined by about 20 others before everyone was inducted at the opening. By January 2026 the roll had reached 354 people, among them one woman, the executive Effa Manley.
Election rules are strict. A player needs 10 major league seasons and must wait five years after retiring before the Baseball Writers' Association of America can vote on him. Each writer names up to 10 candidates; appearing on at least 75% of ballots means election, while dropping below 5% removes a player from the writers' ballot. Candidates get ten years of chances, down from fifteen before 2015, after which the Veterans Committee takes over. Mariano Rivera, the Yankees closer, became in 2019 the first player picked on every writer's ballot.
Exceptions have been made for tragedy. Addie Joss got in in 1978 despite only nine seasons, cut short by meningitis. Roberto Clemente, killed on New Year's Eve 1972, was voted in the following year. For Lou Gehrig, known to be terminally ill, the writers held a special single-candidate election at their 1939 winter meetings so he could be honoured while alive, since no votes took place in 1940 or 1941.
Gambling is the one unforgivable sin. After the 1919 World Series fix, Rule 21 imposed lifetime bans for betting on games involving oneself, keeping Shoeless Joe Jackson and later Pete Rose, who managed the Reds while betting on them, off the ballot. Both were deceased by the time they came off the ineligible list in 2025.
Source: National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum
